A Short History of SEO
In the mid-90's (eons ago) I, like so many of you, made the jump into the internet world with the advent of Windows 95. Do you remember the names of search engines? To many of us, they were then known as"finding tools". Does Archie,Veronica,and Gopher strike a bell as far as search engines? If it doesn't, no problem. Thankfully, Yahoo came along soon after and saved us regular consumer pioneers. In fact, I remember my sister sending me an e-mail via AOL from California saying: "Have you heard of Yahoo?"
Back in 1995, there were only 100 website developement companies in the U.S. All a webmaster had to do then was submit their url or page to the search engines and the search engine spider would crawl their site, then go back and feed the software information to the server which was extracted by the indexer software that sorted links,information,and other pieces to be searched again the next time that particular spider software crawled the site.
Soon "webmasters" realized that it made a difference where they "ranked" on the serp (search engine result page). So it was that seo (search engine optimization) was born. It was simpler in the early days to get ranking results such as with the Inktomi search engine. But as the internet grew,spammers and those involved in "blackhat seo" began to skew the results. For a long time search engines were abused, and the user suffered with unwanted search results.
In 1998, Page and Brin founded Google. They had earlier developed "backrub" that used a pagerank algorithm. Gradually, internet users were drawn to its simple interface, and Google search became even more sophisticated as it tried to maintain the integrity of its search results. Out of these xperiences,"white hat" techniques were studied by Seos to understand Google, and how to optimize a web page without appearing to do so to the Google search engine. Remember, Google doesn't like to be manipulated. They have good reason for this: They are serious about giving good search results to the searcher.
Seo has been around for a long time, but did not grow in its complexity until websites proliferated around 2005. Seo is not a science- yet except for the algorithms Seo's try to master. In 2008, Google changed its algorithm over 400 times! Google is known for keeping its methods close to the vest, so this is where the art of Seo comes into play. What worked yesterday may not pertain to search engine page rankings today. Debate continues over Seo techniques and whether a certain technique is relevant or not. In fact, Seo websites debate ranking techniques everyday.
As search has evolved, Google has dominated the search engines. So Google's judgement of where your page ranks on the search engines is what Seo is attempting to discern. If you want to make money with a monetized web and blog, or if you want an audience for your blogging interest, you have to learn basic Seo, and that is what you will learn from this site.
All the more reason to board the SEO Express!